Tracking exact configurations of composite systems is needed in high-assurance environments, to unambiguously identify aggregate system states. Solutions based on cryptographic hash functions are widely used. Such solutions, however, are inflexible inasmuch as they do not describe any non-determinism aspects of the context, such as uncoordinated completions of unrelated computerized submodules of the system, even if all the final states of the submodules would be individually accepted by the system. This problem is prevalent in high-assurance security systems, environments requiring reliable auditing, compliance-tracking, or configuration management.